by
Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren't built to last beyond
four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational
system
teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners
consequently
feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five--to send the
high-schoolers off to college ("Dawson's Creek"), to recast the leads
("The Dukes of Hazzard"), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws
("Happy Days"). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn't always
mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there's a
Dawn
Summers. Unfortunately, "True Blood" is not one of the exceptions to
the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is
different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying
a
kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has
elevated
jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted
to
vampires--creatures who can, in the "True Blood"-verse, run like The
Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars--sitting around a conference table
debating
politics and religion, and the other "super" groups don't exactly
pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack
leader
and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

When last we left Sookie (Anna Paquin),
she'd just shot she-wolf Debbie Pelt, who'd just shot Tara (Rutina
Wesley), who
jumped into the line of fire to save Sookie. Because Sookie always
takes the
nuclear option, in the premiere episode "Turn! Turn! Turn!," she
decides to keep Debbie's death a secret (fearing jail...half-fae, please!),
and talks vampire Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) into "turning" Tara
to keep her alive--undead, but alive--instead of first asking Pam for a
shot of
that rejuvenating V-juice we keep hearing so much about. Elsewhere,
having
murdered the American Vampire League's head of public relations, Bill
(Stephen
Paquin--er, Moyer) and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) attempt to clean up
their own
crime scene1, while Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll)
saves Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten)
from
being glamoured by the newly-vampirized Reverend Steve Newlin (Michael
McMillian), who showed up on Jason's porch in last year's finale not to
kill him, but to profess a burning desire for him. I'd probably lament
the
creators' cowardice in not seeing Jason's insatiable carnal appetite
through to
its bisexual conclusion on behalf of the show's gay fanbase if McMillian didn't possess the eroticism of a
ventriloquist dummy.

The theme this year is divorcing oneself from one's maker and
forging new connections, as reflected in the series isolating its regulars into splinter groups once this season-four housekeeping
is out of the way, rarely to cross-pollinate them again. It's not
unpoetic, given that this is creator Alan Ball's last hurrah as
showrunner, but in execution it's reminiscent of "Arrested
Development"'s current
M.O., albeit without dedicating entire episodes to a single character
or
dynamic. Still, the effect is no less wearying, as interactions become
increasingly samey and one-note. (And a little Terry (Todd Lowe) goes a
long,
long way. That goes double for Hoyt (Jim Parrack).) Sookie, for all her declarations of independence, is not
someone who
thrives as a solo act, and that's precisely how she spends the majority
of
these episodes, in what feels like a concession to Paquin's salary.
Without the
Three Stooges vying for her heart (even stalwart Alcide (Joe
Manganiello)
throws in the towel) and with Tara giving her the silent treatment
(would that
she do the same for us), Sookie's freed up to work one whole shift at
Merlotte's, which should keep her solvent until Season Six. I thought
they'd
long ago abandoned the farce that is her day job, but I suppose an
efficient way
to top up a mind-reader's self-pity, Sookie's principal motivator, is
to
surround her with judge-y waitresses and chauvinist-pig customers.

Sookie spends much of the season feeling
sorry for herself, this time because of her awesome fairy blood rather than the
fact
that every hot guy in Bon Temps wants to bang her, but same dif: Bottom
line,
she will always find another pea under the mattress to complain about;
does
anybody seriously identify with our heroine? Visiting a
heretofore-unseen
interdimensional Moulin Rouge run by her fae brethren, she learns not
only
that some centuries-old vampire might've called dibs on her before she
was born
(nice of him to wait for a lull in the series to rear his head), but
also that
her powers are finite, and so she sets about purging them from her
system in a
bid for normalcy. Normalcy, in a world of vampires, shape-shifters,
werewolves,
were-panthers, fairies, maenads, necromancers, ghosts, ifrits, brujos,
and God knows
what else. Whatever. You go, girl.

How good could her powers be, really,
considering she fails to detect someone sneaking up behind her to knock
her out
when there's only one other person in the room with her.2That
person is William Sanderson's Sheriff Bud, whose brief return to
the show
should be cause for celebration but instead undoes the goodwill
engendered by
his crisp exit in Season Three. Bud has shacked up with plump Sweetie
Des Arts
(Jennifer Hasty), who's turned his pig farm--in what suggests a
premonitory
parody of Upstream Color--into the homebase of a
redneck militia formed
to rid Bon Temps and beyond of all supernatural lifeforms. As we see in
a
flashback that uses a wide-angle lens on her clownishly tear-streaked
face for
maximum grotesqueness, Sweetie's husband left her for a shifter. There
are a
lot of evil women on this show who aren't subjected to that kind of
aesthetic
humiliation, but they didn't have the gall to be a size 12, I guess. ("True
Blood" may take place in Louisiana, but it's written square in the heart of fat-phobic Los Angeles.) Incidentally, Sweetie's crew wears Obama
masks when wreaking havoc. I believe it's a joke on a certain hillbilly
tendency to hold Obama accountable for everything from the price of gas to
papercuts--why, then, don his face before doling out their special
brand of
justice, thus deifying him? This isn't like Point Break,
where the Nixon
and Reagan masks reflected the capitalist spirit of robbing banks, or the urban nickname for money ("dead presidents"); it's
just
more strangled satire from the people who brought you figurative
homosexuality
in the form of cold, deadly vampirism.

The cultivation of that rancid metaphor
continues with this year's Tara subplot, in which Jessica soothes the
savage
beast that is vampire Tara (and regular Tara, come to think of it) by
co-opting
the anti-gay-bullying mantra "It gets better." Fanger, please!
The point of those words is to inspire hope and patience in the
powerless--and
that's something the vampires on this show, whatever their persecution
complex,
most certainly are not. Or can gay kids fly, too? At least Tara
actually is
gay (again) by the end of the season, her contempt for surrogate mom
Pam
blossoming over the course of these twelve episodes into a mutual attraction
that echoes Eric's own misadventures in incest with
"sister" Nora (Lucy "No-Nudity Clause" Griffiths, who's just awful). The two
of them plus Bill are being held captive in an underground facility while
Roman
(Christopher Meloni, trying in vain to turn reams of gibberish into
Mamet, perhaps misled by the bald rip-off of the "baseball" moment from
The Untouchables), the
500-year-old "guardian" of the recently-secular Vampire Authority, decides what to do
with them for, among other things, not killing Denis O'Hare's Russell
Edgington3
back in Season Three.

Yes, this is the season that deals with the dangers of
religious fundamentalism, again through the stupidest possible vessel
for the
subject: vampires. It seems there is a church doctrine for vampires
even though
they're fucking immortal, and an uprising in the name of Lilith--figure
of
Hebrew legend, Sarah McLachlan inspiration, and alleged first vampire--has given
birth to a movement (the Sanguinista) that aims
to undo years of
mainstreaming and start treating humans like cattle as the so-called
"vampire bible" foretold. And so Bill gets religion, in a painfully
slow yet dramatically abrupt development that culminates in him
drinking a vial
that may or may not contain Lilith's blood, dropping dead, and being
resurrected as some sort of god. Series-salvaging cliffhanger? Hard to
say, but
if "True Blood" keeps going like this, they're gonna need a bigger boat.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
The A/V on HBO's Blu-ray release of
"True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season" is status quo for the series,
which continues to be shot on film in HD-friendly Super35, although the
teeter-tottering dynamic range may tilt more towards blown-out whites
than the
crushed blacks it has in the past. The razor-sharp image--behold chin scars and facial down--twinkles with
fine
grain artificially goosed, per usual, during flashbacks, and the
colours remain
vibrant no matter how bloodless skin tones get. As expected the audio (5.1
DTS-HD MA)
is no less sleek: The show has always had an unusually active mix for
the
medium and this season is no exception. "True Blood" also, for better
or worse, has one of the clearest dialogue tracks on television and
uses the
discrete soundstage in an endearingly playful way, with the rear
channels
turned into a peanut gallery by offscreen zingers obviously dubbed in
on the
fly.

I haven't done the math, but extras seem a
little lighter this year, perhaps as a by-product of the network's
dwindling
interest in the show. (They cut the episode order from 12 to 10 for the
current
season; I wouldn't be surprised if next year they do away with the
rubbery box
packaging of these Blu-rays.) All five discs include the traditional "Enhanced Viewing
Mode"--pop-up interactivity delivering a mix of cutesy-poo "Authority
Confessionals," helpful Flashbacks and Flash Forwards, and assorted
"Histories/Bios/Hints/FYIs"--and "Inside the Episode"
featurettes (3-4 mins. apiece), where the shows' writers and directors
provide recaps
from their peculiar, specialized vantage. Dan Minahan, who helmed "Turn! Turn! Turn!," says, for instance, that actor McMillian was prone to
overdoing it
with the fangs "in a Blacula kind of way," while Ball uses airplane-safety terminology to describe the penultimate
instalment of every season including episode 5.11, "Sunset."

Commentary tracks begin on Disc 2 with
"We'll Meet Again" (5.4), in which repeated assurances that actor
Chris Bauer--here joined by writer Alexander Woo and director Romeo
Tirone--is
slimmer and nicer-looking in person (whether these are directed at him
or us is
hard to say) quickly give way to distracted silence. Disc 4's "Somebody
That I Used to Know" (5.8) pairs writer and co-executive producer Mark
Hudis with actor and first-time helmer Moyer, who does that
thing of
overrationalizing and aggrandizing every single decision he made in his filmmaking debut like he's Orson Welles reincarnate. Also, from the sounds of it he's in
love
with co-star Sam Trammell. I will comfort his wife accordingly. Meanwhile, O'Hare, actress Carrie Preston, and
director Dan
Attias riff on "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (5.9), a
commentary that gets off to an uproarious start because the episode in
question
opens with a naked male extra strapped to a table. (Preston says the
guy later
introduced himself to her at a Hollywood party.) Interesting to hear,
if
obvious in retrospect, that the Merlotte's players rarely cross paths
with the
likes of O'Hare--Preston says that in her experience, "True Blood" is
a show about a bar. Furthermore, those groan-inducing "iStakes" were
apparently incredibly expensive to fabricate.

Yakkers adorn both hours on the fifth and final disc: writer Angela Robinson joins director Lesli Linka Glatter on "Sunset" while Paquin, Ball, and director
Michael
Lehmann team up for the commentary on "Save Yourself" (5.12). To the
former, these two demonstrate that "amazing" is the latest verbal tic to manifest itself in contemporary conversation. They had an amazing
time
working together. I did enjoy the tiny window into the writing
process--by this
point in the season, the scripts are apparently racing to keep up with
production, and this episode, in particular, clocked in so short that
HBO made
them go back and shoot some padding. Amazing. As for the "Save
Yourself" yak-track, I was surprised it wasn't more sentimental. And though Ball reassures
Paquin in the final seconds that his office door will always be open,
this was
recorded long before shooting commenced on Season Six, which by all
accounts
was an epic fail since no one was minding the store.

Disc 5 additionally collates all of the Authority
Confessionals--for Nora, Rosalyn, Salome, Kibwe, Steve, and
Russell--and
contains "True Blood Lines," text-based bios arranged by species for
virtually every speaking character. The only other supplement is back
on Disc
3: "'True Blood' Episode Six: Autopsy" (63 mins., HD) has the
ostensible "game-changer" "Hopeless" (5.6) playing in more
or less real time beneath B-roll and picture-window interviews with
pertinent
cast and crew. I can't say I learned much, apart from the fact that
Lowe's
natural speaking voice is about an octave higher than the one he puts
on for
Terry. Besides overrating the emotional effectiveness of the
episode's many temporary goodbyes (such as Bill's would-be glamouring of
Sookie),
Ball reveals that the crypt serving as Russell's hideout is really the "Six Feet Under" set, so realistically ruined by the art
department that several members of the production worried for their
health.

A complete DVD/Digital Copy of the set, on two platters, is
bundled with the BD gatefold.

1. What
I want to tell the makers of "True Blood", or at
least Eric, is that it doesn't matter if you push a vacuum cleaner at
super-speed:
the vacuum itself will not suck things up any faster. return

2. That's
nothing compared to Sam and (the stacked but
thoroughly uninteresting) Luna's infiltration of the VA compound: They
sneak in
as mice, Sam escapes Bill's clutches therein by turning into a fly, but neither
can
figure out how to free Luna (Janina Gavankar) from a jail cell with bars that must be eight inches
apart.
return

3. Who
goes out like a punk in one of the show's
signature
hasty resolutions to a gonzo cliffhanger. return